Insomnia

I think I'm lonely. I'd forgotten how it steals sleep, how it feels to be willing to do anything to make it not be so.

I just figured this out. I've been lying here trying to figure out where this intermittent insomnia has come from, over the past few weeks since this phase started. Third year--it sounds so ridiculous. Like a joke. It should be impossible to be at this point in my education, my life, because I just got here. Yesterday. Two years later, I don't know anything yet, but there I am, in the hospital for 12 hours a day, seeing patients and generally pretending to have approximate knowledge of almost everything. And I like it. I like that my day begins and ends with kids--I like that fact that the interns and residents seem to enjoy my presence, for the most part. I see things I've only read about and I learn from attendings who want to teach. I have full days and friends on the wards, and I have connected with several classmates whom I truly enjoy. I leave tired but happy, and it should be enough.

But at the core of it, I still feel a vague nagging feeling when I get back to my empty house, of wanting family and friends around--not for intense interaction, but for that effortless, comfortable feeling of being near people who love you. The house seems very silent on most weekdays. My roomie is sometimes there, but more often has already gone to her boyfriend's by the time my key slides in the lock--I won't see her until tomorrow, most likely. My own boyfriend is on a surgery rotation, and by the time he finishes, it is late and there seems to be very little time for the kind of connection I'm missing, and that is difficult. The friends that are here are on other services, and their hours vary wildly, while most people not in my year are gone for the summer. As a cherry on the top of the litany, my birthday is almost here--and they have always been difficult for me. They tend to compound the feelings of loneliness for a myriad of reasons, and it seems this year won't be any different unless I work very hard to change that. I am trying, but my efforts aren't always the most intelligent.

(Short story I will regret tomorrow: At the risk of sounding self-pitying, I will tell you that one year I felt solitary enough to text a random friend, tell him that I was a year older, and that he should call me. The saving grace of this short story is that, in the middle of trying to figure out whether or not I should send such a pathetic text, he actually did call, of his own free will and volition, unaided by the guilt I was about to heap upon his head. That phone call went a long way towards making me feel remembered and connected, and I have always appreciated him for it.)

I suppose the point to this, if I were capable of making any coherent point past midnight, is that I'm finding third year to be sometimes quiet and sad and solitary, more days than not. It's been hard. I've not had the best of luck in finding a big enough variety of people to help shift the feeling away...and I am very much hoping that the discussing of said touchy-feely stuff, here, will do something towards letting me sleep instead of lying here listening to my AC drip. The house feels very empty.

Monsters

I am only days away from 25--practically a grown woman--but I can tell you this. When I walk up to my door at night, I still imagine monsters. Dark slinking ones, like mixtures between giant dogs and demons. They could be crouching on the parking garage roof just above my head as I turn my key in the door, or lurking between the dark cars as I scurry through them, or dashing just behind me when the faulty motion sensor light flickers on and off. It doesn't matter how ridiculous the idea is in the broad light of day. I still imagine monsters.

I don't know where they come from. I've never seen a legit horror film that I can recollect, and my reading material, while touching on the macabre, has never ventured into the gruesome and horrific. But I've never seen any pictures that look worse than the things my mind dreams up when it's dark and I'm alone.

The only thing that works, when I am climbing out of my car in the dark and flinching at every sound and shadow, is to claim the darn things. Make them mine. It's the only way I've ever known to make a nightmare stop, is to decide that whatever the evil thing chasing me may be, it is mine, and we are friends. Every dream in which I've ever made that decision has drastically altered, and I was surprised to find that when I apply the same principle to the imaginary things that frighten me in the night, it works just as well.

And so I found myself doing it tonight. Instead of imagining the possibility that some awful beast might jump down at me from the roof as I'm trying to get my key in the lock, I pretend I'm safe because whatever is there is actually looking out for me. And it works. I don't feel nearly as nervous when I make the transition from imagining fear to imagining security. The world doesn't seem so scary when the worst things your imagination can come up with are protecting you.

Anyway. I realized that I was doing it again tonight, and I laughed, because let's face it--I'm too old for this. But it keeps life interesting.